Christmas is a chance to end a miserable year on a high. That means raucous office piss-ups, anarchic family get-togethers, and impish toddlers greedily unpacking their stockings. Not so for our elderly, though. A shocking number spend the festive season …
The flaws in the Lucy Letby case
Appearing for the Crown in a murder trial he was hoping to lose, a senior colleague once quipped: “People want to know how we defend the guilty, but the really tricky thing is prosecuting the innocent.” I’ve only done it …
A food apocalypse is coming
In the dystopian drama The Last of Us, a fungal virus has spread through foodstuffs turning infected humans into zombies. The survivors live in ghettos, among the ruins, armed to avoid a gruesome living death. They grow their own food …
Cousin marriage isn’t ‘unspeakable’
The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative …
Cousin marriage isn’t ‘unspeakable’
The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative …
How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict
Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what later revealed to be a coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity”. Pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, …
Could Elon Musk make Farage king?
Morgan McSweeney, Dominic Cummings and Tony Blair. They represent wildly different political traditions and instincts, but to spend any time with them is to be immediately struck by how closely their analyses can overlap. And right now, their Venn diagram …
Christmas won’t cheer Birmingham’s homeless
Christmas in central Birmingham, as in many other UK cities, is dominated by a German market and a nimbus of tacky festive lights. Frankfurters the length of limbs; steins of overpriced lager; shoals of inebriated revellers — all can be …
Why I’m leaving the UK
The United Kingdom is a totalitarian hellscape. Freedom of speech has been all but abolished. Our police forces are now indistinguishable from the Gestapo. Criticism of the government will soon be illegal under imminent laws against thought crime. It will …
Is Britain sleepwalking into war?
The collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria has not changed the balance of power in the war between Russia and Ukraine. There is no doubt that the Ukraine war, after the deaths of hundreds of thousands, will end through negotiations, …
The private police patrolling London
One golden autumn afternoon, in a quiet North London suburb, I stumbled across a portal to a possible English future. Hadley Wood sits on the fringes of the city, between Barnet and the M25, seemingly forgotten in its own little …
The dirty secret about OnlyFans
Haven’t you heard? Prostitution is empowering. Liberated super-vixen and self-described feminist Lily Phillips, 23, has declared she is to embark on the sticky Sisyphean task of bedding 1,000 men in one day. Other OnlyFans “models” — a tellingly bashful euphemism …
How Britain’s trains were derailed
An apocryphal British newspaper headline once read: “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off”. It’s a nice phrase — but, in theory anyway, its whiff of British exceptionalism has long-since evaporated. Many educated people, if you asked them, would these days …
Labour’s politics of polite automatons
The foundations. The missions. The milestones. The targets. The earnest gestures and the hand-clasped, feigned intensity. In the end, none of it matters. Keir Starmer’s “plan for change” — resetting his government after months of drift — only proves one …
Keir Starmer has no dream
There are periods in history when old certainties and settlements suddenly begin to fracture under the weight of their own contradictions. In the Thirties and Seventies the very nature of the system seemed to be collapsing in on itself. Yet …